Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

To be helpful, on the question of the OECD's comments on how to deliver a modern public service, it requires flexibility and is about changes of attitude and approach. The genuine requirement of public accountability also arises. How does one provide discretion at the appropriate level, while at the same time ensuring criteria are in place to avoid what might be regarded as arbitrary decision making under the guise of the use of discretion? These are not easy issues in terms of best practice in public administration. However, in the context of trying to provide services on the ground, there must be a tie-up or collaboration between the health, local education and welfare services. I refer, for example, to efforts to deal with how one should help disadvantaged pupils in schools, how one ensures that people attend school or how one helps them to do so while well fed and nourished. Apart from putting a remedial teacher in a classroom, there is a range of attributes that will secure the same outcome.

What is under discussion is the scenario whereby everyone sticks to the silo system, in which this is one's own job, that is the other person's job and so on. Consequently, although everyone seeks, with the best of good faith, to provide such services, they are not co-ordinated sufficiently well to achieve the outcomes one would expect, given the resources being input from various public sector sources. To get down to the nitty gritty, what institutional structure is required to make that happen better than was the case previously?

The Fitzgerald report is an excellent report in respect of its succinctness. It comes from a person who has operated at the highest echelons of public administration and with a fair amount of respect from all sides. For example, he has made the point that although a great deal of money was going into certain areas of Limerick, which was the subject of the report, the cumulative output was not what one would expect, given the resources that were being invested. This is because a lack of co-ordination will exist unless some overarching principle is in play. This involves a cultural change in how services are delivered, as well as the institutional and organisational arrangements. By providing those local agencies in Limerick that were established to pull all that together, we are witnessing a far better outcome for the same level of resources. In many cases, resources are not at issue.

This is what the OECD means when it refers to trying to get an integrated public service. Quite understandably, precedent has built up in various Departments of State over the years. Arising from this, various types of agencies or public service vehicles have been established to deliver the expanded services that are voted in this House on an annual or continual basis. However, the problem as I perceive it is that there must be overarching senior management within the public service with an overview of all of that. We must get in place a structure that delivers the bang for the buck taxpayers are entitled to expect.

All the time, this argument falls back to Members in respect of the parameters of their debates, for example, less money means fewer services. However, if the money and services are better integrated, it may not be a resource issue at all. In some areas of the public service such as, for example, the aforementioned health service, the level of increase in resources, despite agreement by all that it should be provided as a priority, in many instances is bringing improvements to services that Members do not communicate to the public. Many areas of the health services are working well and have improved under the new structure. There are other areas which perennially are a problem. Such problems are structural because of a lack of a tie-up between primary care, acute hospital care and the accident and emergency services. Members know this to be the case and rather than falling back on the continual arguments in this Chamber, which throw more heat than light on the issue, we must get back out to those communities and tell them that while sufficient resources are being provided, they are not being provided in a sufficiently co-ordinated manner because of the perennial problems that are highlighted continually. In many cases, best practice models can be seen in various parts of the service, such as the community or acute hospital services. People spoke to respective parties about these issues, where we are not seeing that being translated across the service in a way expected if, for example, it was an industry or best practice issue where greater productivity or better organisational arrangements are evident in the provision of services in one part of the country as against another.

That is the challenge and all of us committed to public service provision must ensure that as we defend our political position, we also recognise that the public confidence must be bolstered in regard to the delivery of these services. People are saying they are not getting a service in an expected way in return for the amount of taxpayers' money they are providing — it is the taxpayer who provides the money.

We must get back to a consumer and citizen focus and to recognising that service providers, as important representatives and constituents in policy formulation, are not the full picture. The full picture involves those people awaiting and requiring services and in many cases they are being provided to a far better standard than we give credit for in that we try to portray every aspect of the service as being in crisis management but that is not the case. At the same time, where we identify best practice we do not translate it across the service sufficiently quickly. On behalf of citizens, we must address that issue, not just as Government but as Parliament.

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